Posted by Bill Kee, Product Marketing

We're happy to announce that Google Message Discovery is now available for purchase online. Google Message Discovery is a package of online services that gives businesses more control over the storage and security of their email. Now any business, small or large, can easily implement strong email security as well as reliable archiving.

The cornerstone of Google Message Discovery is email archiving. What is email archiving? Many businesses already have some email backup because they recognize it's critical to:

• recover lost mail
• comply with regulations regarding email retention
  
• access emails in response to a litigation or other investigation
  

The problem is, the backup systems many businesses use, such as tape drives or extra email servers, aren't sufficient. It's costly and complex to store huge amounts of data on email servers. And it's nearly impossible to find specific emails quickly when searching through a pile of backup tapes.

Email archiving is different. Unlike a backup, an archiving service:

• provides storage that automatically scales with your needs
  
• captures all sent and received messages (Backup systems merely take a snapshot of your mail storage at a certain time, say every night at midnight, and don't capture messages that may have been sent and then deleted in the meantime)
  
• allows specific policies to be set around message retention time periods
  
• allows authorized administrators to search across email for all users quickly
  

The message archiving service in Google Message Discovery is designed to help businesses of all sizes easily achieve these goals. It's included with Google Apps Premier Edition, and also supports other email systems, such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino.

Since the service is hosted by Google, there's no hardware or software to install. And it provides powerful search tools to help you quickly locate relevant emails when you need them. Message Discovery also includes email filtering and security, which blocks spam, viruses and other threats before they reach your servers or inbox.

We see email archiving and security as a foundational element for helping businesses organize their information and make it accessible and useful. And now that we've made it available online- starting at $25 per user, per year- we look forward to helping organizations quickly take greater control over their email.

Posted by Pamela Saenger, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Today, the Google Docs team began launching offline access to English interface users. With Google Gears working behind the scenes, users will be able to view their docs lists and view and edit documents, all without an Internet connection. You can see it in action in this video starring Ken Norton, the Google Docs product manager.

While the initial launch is rolling out first to personal Google Docs users, it will launch later to Google Apps domains. If you're eager to have your Apps users try it out as early as possible, you can opt in your domain via the admin control panel (find out more in the Google Apps Help Center).

For more on this launch, check out the post on the Google Docs blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Those of you who read the Gmail team's blog may have seen an announcement a while back about Gmail's faster, more flexible new codebase. The changeover was successful, and now we're rolling it out to the businesses, schools and organizations that use Google Apps.

More details about this update are on the Gmail blog, and you can keep up with future changes as they happen with the new RSS feed for Google Apps updates. To subscribe to the feed, click this "Add to Google" button.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Keeping up with the steady stream of updates and innovations can be a challenge for Google Apps administrators. Starting today there's a new source of information you can count on for details about every update. This info is available as an RSS feed. To subscribe to new updates and see a digest of past improvements, click this "Add to Google" button:



Let us know if there's something you'd like to see in a future update of Google Apps.  Your feedback helps us focus our progress.

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Product Marketing Manager

Here at Google Enterprise, we're always wondering what's on the minds of IT professionals and end users. So we asked them. An annual tradition started by Postini, this year's survey on message security and compliance was conducted by a third party and involved 575 IT professionals. Questions ranged from "What productivity challenges does IT face?" to "Who is responsible for security and data leakage?"

Not surprisingly, the majority of respondents (53%) believe that IT holds ultimate responsibility for their organization's communications security and compliance, as shown below. They also realize that organizations need to have policies and mechanisms in place to help achieve this.


These results and more are now available in a white paper called the 2008 Communications Intelligence Report. The report also includes sections on Google's expectations for security in 2008 and security and compliance best practices.

We hope these findings will help shed light on the forces that are influencing the growing adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS), which is taking the place of in-house solutions that tend to require significant internal resources to maintain. The results suggest that one reason SaaS is gaining momentum is that the problems it solves are top-of-mind for IT departments, such as spending too much time or money on troubleshooting and maintenance.


By using service providers, organizations can offload capacity challenges, get real-time updates, and benefit from the economies of scale of a large network. And there's more good news: With Google's recent launch of new security and compliance products, organizations of all sizes can afford and easily implement best-in-class security and compliance.

Posted by Jim Payne, Product Manager

We're excited to announce a new product designed specifically for businesses who want to put Google Maps on their website: Google Maps API Premier. We've taken customer feedback and added several features to this product especially for companies:

- A SLA that guarantees 99.9% uptime
- Customer support for critical issues
- Customer control over ads

Not to mention all the benefits of the most intuitive mapping solution available, including high interactivity, driving directions, satellite imagery, terrain -- and street view in select cities, and fast performance, even on the busiest websites.

Google Maps is the #1 mapping site in the world, and more than 50,000 active sites use the Maps API -- including companies like Kayak, Ace Hardware, and Trulia. The new Premier product makes it even more attractive for companies to add Google Maps to their website. Especially in industries like retail, travel, real estate, and news where location information is critical to your customers' understanding of the products you are selling.

If you're interested, contact us and we'll let you know how to get on our maps.

Posted by Matt Kulick, Associate Product Manager

Google Apps users appreciate that their web-based Google Calendars are available anywhere and anytime, and packed with powerful sharing options. But people aren't always connected to the Internet, and they may prefer to use different applications (like Microsoft Outlook calendar) at their home or office. One of the biggest issues we hear from users is how hard it is to keep all of their calendars up to date.

Today, we're pleased to announce a tool to sync Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook calendar. If you add an event in your Microsoft Outlook calendar, it will automatically sync to Google Calendar and be accessible at any time, whether you're using a browser or a mobile phone. Similarly, if you schedule an event with a future pop-up reminder in Google Calendar, you will automatically see that reminder in your Microsoft Outlook calendar on your computer. Your Microsoft Outlook calendar and Google Calendar are automatically kept up to date, leaving you free to use whichever one you want.

We also want to ensure that your contacts see your calendar information only if you intend to share with them. You can set the default privacy level in Google Calendar to "private" so events synced from Microsoft Outlook calendar are marked private, and only you (or others who you've granted permission to view event details) will see them on Google Calendar. You can also choose to sync in just one direction if you prefer to keep your private data only in Microsoft Outlook calendar, or only in Google Calendar.

Google Calendar Sync is now available for free for all Google Apps users at http://dl.google.com/googlecalendarsync/GoogleCalendarSync_Installer.exe.